


Misery, Company

by Anonymous



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Dave Lalonde - Freeform, Homestuck Kidswap, Other, Rose Strider - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-24
Updated: 2020-04-24
Packaged: 2021-03-01 21:46:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,178
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23814031
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Your name is Rose Strider, and you are going to war.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 52
Collections: Anonymous





	Misery, Company

A fresh coat of blood sprays over the maroon stains long set into the gravel. Neither you nor your Bro could ever be bothered to clean the living room of its bottle pileup; much less would you lift a finger to wash the rooftop. Its only purpose, anyhow, is bloodshed. Reliquiae of battle are carved into its concrete, as they are into you. Desert city sunlight has cracked the aging paint and the skin around your mouth into a collection of chipped fissures. Bladed grooves gauge where you’ve missed unmeasured blows. Your Bro does not miss. His strikes are instead monumented in the telltale new-flesh bleach of cicatrices around your arms, your shoulders, one in your waist. On days when arid wind does not blow away yesterday’s debris, you come up here to obsess over the booted patterns of footwork. Familiarity grinds sparks like clashing steel against a howling, novel sensation of victory. Your Bro’s once enviable ox guard falters as he recoils, grimacing at the nick you’ve broached into his bicep. You step into the gap he leaves behind. You are winning.

You are winning.

You knew your Bro would issue his final challenge soon, now that the game is at last underway. And he would’ve done it with the certainty of his death. What sweet victory that would’ve been - for him. To have raised you into the apex of power, then hand-delivered your apotheosis? To unleash the wrath of his laboriously sculpted warrior onto Skaia’s forces, with such trust in his handiwork that he will not even deign witness it play out? What greater pride?

Instead, you struck first. He underestimated your will, as befits any proper mentor; to condescend the tutee until they find drive to improve. To punish the erring sword. To look down on you, physically, nose curled up but never high enough for you to get a glimpse behind those stupid shades. True might cannot be found in afternoon teatime, no matter what Lalonde tells himself. Now, you will repay your Bro’s lessons with one of your own. He will learn that the brightest students need only disobey once. Drifting towards your Bro barely registers as your will. It is not the conscious, but the ineluctable assurance of muscle memory which draws the serrated arc of your knife upwards. You are stepping on fate’s throat. Your Bro’s sword is many times heftier, easily poised to force your attack down against the ground. But he does not fall for the feint. Instead, he lets you slip within range of his legs and fires a kick into your stomach, into that infuriating blind side he’s tried time and again to drill you into protecting. Every time he’s vulnerated it, it grows unsound, and now you’ll topple over, pathetic and squirming to nurse your aching oblique.

So you’ve let him think. The pain in your ribs is an old confidant whispering a prophecy of victory. Here lies the difference between you and your Bro: he is a creature of emotion. He must be, for why would he have raised you otherwise, with such meticulous precision, to free you of all reservation? Through gritted, crimson teeth, you trap your Bro’s calf on its retreat and excavate plates of thigh muscle until you’ve rent into his femoral artery. He screams and tries to pull away. He is stronger than you, but mortally injured. You stunt his escape attempt with a tug-of-war yank, ripping a sanguine spurt from the open wound. Both of you tumble to the ground to the rhythm of two awkward thuds. Your ribs burn dully where the kick landed. A metallic din snaps you out of the temptation to catch your breath and hold your side: your Bro’s weapon has slipped out of his hands. Yours hasn’t. He barely manages to grip it in time to block the blow you aim at his throat. Your left leg slides against the thickening pool of blood on the floor, but you rally, press further. He’s exsanguinating at a dizzying rate. It is only a matter of time. The scramble has knocked those moronic shades off his nose - no matter how much he’s taught you, you could never bring yourself to respect his sense of fashion. If only he’d appreciate the magnanimous favor you’re granting his future carcass by closing his curtain when he’s not wearing them. Beneath where the tinted plastic would hide his expression, his eyes widen wild in -

\- is that fear?

Is this the man who’s taught you everything you know? The instructor who would strike you into exactitude if your eyes dared wander anywhere other than furious forward scowling? Has this piteous snivel been silently taunting you under those fucking shades every time you’ve fought?

The weight of your Bro’s blade stops mattering. Metal, skin, even his windpipe are flimsy barriers, inadequate to keep you away from your real target. You want to stab through him and into the farcical lifetime spent idolizing his facade. A monstrous surge of strength pushing your knife ever closer to the dead center of his neck only furthers your discovery: attaching your future to someone makes you weak. No more going through your Bro’s film library, nurturing a childish passion for martial arts flicks. No more modeling yourself after a falsehood. It is time to grow up.

And then, in the agonizing second before you land the killing blow, your Bro chokes out:

“Good job.”

His postlude ends there, punctuated by a spasmodic, gory cough. Flecks of vermilion phlegm enter your eye. You twist away on instinct without taking your hands off the dagger, the redistribution of your weight forcing the blade further into his throat. Down to the hilt. You feel his palm tighten around your wrist, that steely grip you’ve met in combat so many times before, and you cannot tell if he is trying to push the blade out, or keep you from pulling it out yourself. It occurs to you that he might simply want to soothe his terminal throes by holding his little sister. But this is a flight of fantasy, likely something you picked up from the contemptible larger-than-life cinema your Bro has such affinity for. Had. His grip slackens to meet the shortening rhythm of his breathing. Hands limpen to his sides in the anteroom of rigor mortis. Even in death, his touch escapes you. 

You have won.

Your knife is not designed to wound cleanly. It exits your Bro’s neck with a tortuous, jagged noise which, you realize, you’ve never dug deep enough into another person to elicit, and you abjectly cannot help but compare it to the sound of slicing ham. Behind your pommel, the pool of deep scarlet above his trachea thickens as to become nearly black. His neck gapes. Any lengthwise chopping would have decapitated him. One hand rummages your pockets for a piece of cloth you keep fastidiously pristine. The only thing your Bro ever taught you to clean without delay is your knife. You slide off the cadaver and give the blackened steel a few absent rubs. The hazy patina of red over your eyes makes of the routine task an onerous burden. You abjure the mist with a couple of blinks. Something else wets your eyes. Scalding hot, like acid, like so many mountains boiling volcanic until the pressure rips its peak away and dooms clueless cities at their skirts to a sulphur sepulcher, a cauldron of tears rolls down your face. There is no wind today, nothing to drown the sound of your frailty dripping on the dirty blade in your lap. This, next to a warm corpse, ignoring the phone madly buzzing in your pocket, is the closest you’ve come to crying in front of someone else. You bite your lip, trying to evoke a hurt that will force you into focus - a trick that’s worked every time your Bro’s knocked on your door or your friends request a video call in the midst of such shameful displays. It doesn’t work this time. A mind desperately trying to stay inane cycles through your lexical trove to find a word for what you’re feeling. But there is no one finger to point. Life, you are discovering, is not the labyrinthine prose of the tragic novelists you hold in such esteem, either. It is a multitudinal conflict of feelings waging nameless wars on each other. It is a situation that escapes the arrogant, meager control of the kingdom of words. It is the whirring of a jetpack you’ve missed in your grief, and the memory that you’d asked Dave to meet you in real life for the first time here, now, in the aftermath of your conquest.

DAVE: oh holy shit 

DAVE: you really um 

DAVE: you did it huh 

You snap to attention. The tears do not stop flowing; they cannot. But your neck stiffens, and you manage to force your eyes forward, away from the ground that threatens you with the comfort of resting your head and crying freely. There is no hiding the stream your tears have cleared through sweat and grime on the way down your cheeks, but a furrowed brow staunches the worst of it. The most composed move is to turn to meet his gaze. For the first time in your life, you’re happy to see shades, instead of the therapist’s pity that must lurk behind them. Unbidden by the need to kill his family, Dave has busied himself with slaying the game’s monsters and climbing up the echeladder; if the jetpack wasn’t enough, he also sports an exorbitant three-piece suit. You wonder if this “level” disparity, this absurd videogame abstraction, means he is, however temporarily, stronger than you. The thought taps into an anger you are finding it mercifully easy to access, enough for you to grace a steady-voiced response:

ROSE: Dave.

A silence grows between you, in a way that it never has during the almost fraternal back-and-forths online. You expected this reaction. Physical violence stuns you little in comparison to Dave and his wimpy inclination for the realms of the mind. You consider it a willful ignorance, a social ill unfortunately infecting your friends from birth, this massive effort to shy away from the basic reality of the organic. What you did not expect was that your throat would be as dry as his.

DAVE: do you um

DAVE: want to talk about it

ROSE: Do you think you’ll know what to say?

The ice in your own voice takes you by surprise. The sun is merciless, and you’re burning with warlike exertion, but a horrible cold radiates from your solar plexus. Not quite like having your wind knocked out. Rather frozen in and stuck to the alveolus. In trying to not explode at Dave, you’ve sunk instead into the frostburn of practicality. Your tears can dry in solitude, like they always do.

DAVE: its not about what i will answer

DAVE: its about what you want to say

ROSE: Evidently.

Your eyes narrow, as if you could discern the bag of psychoanalytical sleights he’s fumbling at. You already weren’t banking on any of your friends shouldering their share of the fighting. It is now clear to you that you could never trust them with the emotional burden, either. And you cannot depend on yourself; look at you, cleft by misery where you should be celebrating a fulfilled fate. You’re all doomed. In your brother’s corpse lies the grief of five.

DAVE: okay i get it

DAVE: you dont want to talk about it right now

DAVE: maybe because his corpse is right there

ROSE: Your virtuosity for the obvious is unerring. I suppose such observations are the bedrock of psychology.

Meandering does not make you feel better, but it stabilizes you.

DAVE: rose im not trying to therapy you

DAVE: weve all been thrust into this fucking

DAVE: situation

DAVE: where cooperation is paramount

DAVE: and maybe like for once it might be more efficient to let down your defenses

ROSE: Not doing the best of jobs at not therapying me.

DAVE: sorry im worried about you

DAVE: im your friend

You can bear to look at Dave no longer. Your gaze escapes to the horizon. In the distance, meteors obliterate the skyline. Your hand robotically polishes the knife.

ROSE: As my friend, then, would you do anything for me?

DAVE: uhh

DAVE: thats one way of putting it

DAVE: i guess yes

ROSE: Then leave.

He is frozen, for a moment, torn between his desire to counsel you, and the want you’ve so clearly posited. But he capitulates; in the corner of your eye, his silhouette slips towards the door. You didn’t tell him to come in, but you find you won’t ask him to stop either. There is a suspicious pause after the unlatching of the lock. Sure enough, he gets one last offer in.

DAVE: ill be inside

Then it’s just you, and the sun, and the realization that you’ve learned much about killing, but nothing about burying a body.

**Author's Note:**

> An exploration of the crown-Prince of Time, and also of not coping.
> 
> Will I do more with this? Perhaps. Perhaps.


End file.
